Livre d'Or

Well... it's a long story (I'll probably write about it sometime when I manage to find the words) but the summary is, I wanted to make a difference, and I couldn't do that in physics. Outside academia, there was very little room for the sort of physics I wanted to do here in the Philippines. So I think if I'd stayed there I'd just have felt helpless and increasingly embittered, because it would be like... finally living the "be a scientist! uplift your country!" ideal (which has been pounded in my brain since I was eleven -- I went to a science high school) and finding that once you get there you couldn't do anything anyway. That if you wanted to do cutting-edge stuff, if you wanted to be in a place where people valued your work, it just wasn't... here. Science here isn't exactly dead, it's just widely regarded as irrelevant (because we have more fundamental issues to fix, and also because science education here is-- really, really bad) and slowly being asphyxiated, and as it is I don't think it can get out of that stranglehold by itself.

First the fundamental flaws in the way the Philippines handles education and research in the sciences have to change. The thing is, if you want to influence policy in this country you don't stay in the sciences; you either go into economics or law. So for me going into economics was a choice to make the most of what I had so I could, well, do things. Be listened to. Help the sciences here in my own way, but from the outside, so I wouldn't be quite as limited. It took me over four years to really get into econ, to be honest, and until now I still have to swallow hard every time someone seriously refers to me as an economist, but there it is. I'm beginning to discover I might actually be more suited for this than for physics. I am not sure whether to be disquieted or pleased.

AUGH, I'm sorry about the tl;dr, I can just go on and on and on about this.